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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting thing is how hard the true believers find it to let go of the past.

I bought one of the first Amigas - I own 2 Amiga 1000's and several others.

But for me they are nothing but items in a curiosity cabinet. Other people seem to deeply engage emotionally with some sort of alternate fictional future in which technology X or technology Y was recognised for its true destiny and never defeated by IBM/Microsoft whoever.

Computing moved on an other systems became much better. Don't waste your life living in the past. Just drop that dead technology and move on and stop investing yourself in a fantasy world.

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I'm no psychologist, but itcseems yo be a very common theme in the human condition.

First we find a "tribe", maybe it's a sports team, or a computer, or a political party, or a brand of beer. Anything that lets me bond with my peers and lets us be "me and mine", versus "you and yours".

The longer I'm in this group, the more the cycle feeds back, the harder it is to break out.

At some point it's no longer about the common factor. it's about belonging to the tribe. Maybe we got together when say Mercedes was the pinicle of cars. I become a "Mercedes driver". I join a Mercedes club, we do fun runs on Sunday, they're my tribe. Even if (and I'm not saying it is) Mercedes turns into junk, our tribe is still our tribe.

Not wanting to pick a side, but you see this in politics now. For lots of people now it doesn't matter who is running, or what the policies are, it only matters what tribe I'm in. And my tribe is better, the other tribe is rubbish. Those in neither tribe can't understand, because to them both tribes are terrible (perhaps in different ways.)

In the 80s and 90s, the computer platform you chose -was- your identity. Switching from one to another was hard, and socially suicidal. Ideally the switch was done -for- you, not -by- you. My dad's office changed from Apple 2 to PC. Since I couldn't buy my own PC, I got what they got.

But if I had invested my had earned cash in say Apple, it would have been a next to impossible option to just scrap that investment and start over.

Amiga was once way out on top of the pile. By -all- metrics. They were the tribe on top. But it's hard to fall from there and not need to blame someone, or something. It's not the product that failed. It's the people.

It's not a fantasy, the Amiga was a real platform. It was also one of the last systems that could be just about simple enough to be comprehensively documented and understood, making for a kind of openness-focused DevX that's quite unparalleled even to this day. For that matter, there's plenty of "dead" technology out there that still retains quite a bit of educational value if nothing else.

Personally, there were many things going on with the Amiga that I really enjoyed, things that have diminished or been left by the wayside as computers developed. I don't just mean technical stuff, I mean ergonomic and social aspects too. So I spend time on my Amiga to connect with those things and figure out how we can revive them today.

The Amiga was special and magical. There was never a computer so far advanced than anything else on the market, that existed before, or since. It took the IBM PC many years to catch up to the Amiga's power and some of its abilities. There are still powerful features of the Amiga hardware and software that systems today do not have and Amiga owners still pine for. It's something someone who never owned an Amiga or owned one but never understood its power, won't understand. The fact there are still so many Amiga fans keeping the community alive is a testament to how great the Amiga was and could have been if its life was not cut off by people who cared only for short-term gains and didn't appreciate what it was and what it could have been.

It’s not the past though when it’s a computer that actually exists. Are you also gonna tell me not to grow my own vegetables bc we have agriculture? It’s fine to enjoy old things, there’s no reason to throw it all out just because a new thing comes out

maybe you haven't seen the amiga community, it's pretty weird. they still make new hardware for it like expensive Holy Shit accelerator cards with HD graphics, hundreds of megabytes of ram, and hundreds of MHz CPUs and people buy them so its not always about being retro.

What's weird about making new hardware for an old computer? I don't get the issue

well not really an issue with it spend your money how you like etc but I don't really get why you would replace most of the components in an amiga with something like 50x more powerful and act like its the same thing. it still runs amigaos so i guess it kind of is an amiga, but still, why would you do that.. I guess i just don't get it. And the amiga is like the only community where people do this

Amiga forever!

Still being sold @ https://www.amigaforever.com/

That is indeed a cool project. I was referring to Amiga living forever though. :)

Sunk cost fallacy generally speaking.

Same reason teenagers perpetually wage the war between XBox and Playstation to the delight of the two companies' marketing teams.

It's a bit of that, but it's not only that. Some things of the Amiga we still don't have in modern computers.

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